Wall Street Crash of 1929

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 was a severe collapse in United States stock prices beginning in late October 1929, most sharply on October 24 (Black Thursday) and October 29 (Black Tuesday), when roughly sixteen million shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day and about fourteen billion dollars in stock value was wiped out. It is popularly remembered as the opening event of the Great Depression, though historians and economists continue to debate how much of the following decade's downturn the crash itself caused as against deeper structural weaknesses already present in the economy.